Blizard Sues Virtual Gold Seller

DaphneDiane writes "Blizzard announced that they are suing one of the heavily spamming gold sellers, Peons4hire. Peons4hire had recently been spamming players in World of Warcraft with multi-line messages advertising their power leveling and gold selling business. With the advent of the recently released 2.1.0 patch Blizzard made it easier to report and block these spammers. I've noticed a large decrease in spam while playing since the patch. It used to be that I would get nearly a dozen spams a night but I barely have seen any since."

Comments

Result

[milo_a_wagner]

From the comments under TF'A', it seems as though this has had a massive impact. With the filing of a Federal lawsuit, perhaps we'll be sending another, louder message that these nuisances are no more acceptable in virtual universes than they are in ours.

Re:Wherever you go, there you are

[AlephNot]

There's no such thing as a utopia--real or virtual. Suffering is the kick in the pants that forces us to become better people. A utopia is a world where no one has any incentive to become a better person (since there's no suffering), in which case, I'm glad no utopia can exist.

Cold-hearted? Sure. But so is reality.

My Own Research

[The Living Fractal]

I've been playing WoW since beta.

Up until now, since the release of WoW, gold spam has followed a nearly expontential curve. At first it was almost zero. Slowly over time it built up. Recently it exploded and you couldn't go five minutes without getting a whisper from some character named something like "Fahzhizdaj" asking you to go to their website and buy gold or powerleveling etc. After patch 2.1.0 spam has not disappeared. It has morphed into different forms. Instead of receiving private messages from spammers they have resorted to different means. Now you cannot run through the major cities without getting bombarded with local messages from the "say" or "yell" channels.

This means that the gold spammer literally had to run a character from the starting town, at low level, to the major city. While not difficult, it certainly added an extra step to the spammers' setup. And once that person spams in a major city they will be reported much faster than if a million players all got individual private messages. People in the game in a common area will communicate with each other about stuff like this. The spammers can't possibly last long.

So you might be wondering, where does a spammer get an account? Most people think they use trial accounts, or they buy accounts. Of course, both are usable. Trial accounts are locked down for many things, but they aren't locked down to the local 'say' channel. So camping a trial account spammer at the auction house in a major city will net a pretty big payoff in terms of impact vs. time spent, especially since the trial account is free.

Spammers also get accounts in other ways too. People who purchase power-leveling services, for example, are at risk of allowing their account to be compromised to a spammer. People who go to websites claiming they have WoW exploits/cheats are at risk of using a keylogger and compromising their account. Then there's stolen credit cards and false account numbers. The actual numbers on all of these are impossible to determine for me. But nevertheless, these are some ways the spammers do it.

The real crux of the issue though is that spammers, and more generally, gold selling, wouldn't even exist if people didn't buy the services! Because demand is so high it is not reasonable to expect in-game ads to disappear completely. But what Blizzard has done is definitely a giant step in the right direction -- IF you aren't one of the large minority of people who have actually purchased gold. If you are, you probably liked the spam sometimes, because usually it provides up-to-the-minute price info and increases competition between the sellers.

You might be wondering: does one run the risk of getting scammed purchasing gold from these people?

I didn't know the answer to that, so, I looked into it deeper. I went to their sites. There were numerous ones advertised but, after getting deeper into each site, eventually I was taken to a specific site almost every time: gold4power.com Of the eight or so websites I visited, every one of them led me to this one site. And it wouldn't amaze me if Peons4Hire was actually behind this one.

I have no idea who runs this site, but I wanted to see how legit they were. So I sent them a small amount of money through paypal and, lo and behold, 30 minutes later, the gold was in my mailbox. I figure at least they aren't just scamming people completely.

Anyway, spam is bad, yada yada. Get used to it, or download a mod like SpamSentry and put a stop to it.

TLF

Re:Wherever you go, there you are

[gilroy]

Just to be clear: You're saying something like: People are rotten. Because people are rotten, real life is harsh. Because real life is harsh, we need to become better people (to reduce the harshness, I suppose). Utopias would imply an existence without that motivation, so we'd all stay rotten people. Hence, it's good that no utopias do or can exist.

But... the point of a utopia is exactly that people aren't rotten (in the utopia). It's not about easy living -- natural disasters can still occur, people still die, etc. It's about everyone working together for the net greater good. It's about people not competing in a life that's nasty, brutish, and short. So if a utopia did exist, its inhabitants wouldn't need to better themselves.

I agree that utopias don't exist in the Universe we inhabit. But I'm not sure I buy the idea that the impossibility of a utopia is a good thing. It sounds a lot like rationalization to me.

Side snark: Of course "There's no such thing as a utopia--real or virtual". The name was chosen by Sir Thomas More specifically from the Greek that means "no place" or "place that cannot exist". :)

Re:Interesting.

[Decado]

As far as I am aware the legal situation is that Blizzard claim ownership of all the items/gold etc in WoW. By selling these items the gold sellers are basically selling Blizzards property which amounts to theft.